Column: Kamala Harris faced a high bar for her DNC acceptance speech. She soared past it

CHICAGO —  On the final night of the Democratic National Convention, expectations were high and rumors were rampant.

Speculation of a surprise guest — Taylor Swift? Beyoncé? — turned out to be nothing but wishful thinking.

No matter.

Kamala Harris crushed it.

The vice president was always the main attraction of the four-day event and her Thursday night acceptance speech was always intended as its grand finale.

From the moment she strode out flashing her high-wattage smile, Harris commanded the stage with a purpose and passion that eluded her the last time she ran, aimlessly and unsuccessfully, for the White House.

Politics

Photos: DNC underway in Chicago with an energized Harris-Walz ticket

Los Angeles Times photojournalists Robert Gauthier and Myung J. Chun are on the ground in Chicago to capture behind-the-scenes visuals and candid moments.

Aug. 22, 2024

In just over 37 minutes, Harris capped what’s been a remarkable monthlong run of luck and political success with a powerful address that strongly positions her for the last stretch of this fiercely fought presidential campaign.

Our columnists Mark Z. Barabak and Anita Chabria — who, combined, have attended precisely zero Swift or Beyoncé concerts — overcame their disappointment at the no-show and collected themselves to share these thoughts.

Barabak: Previewing this convention, I’d made fun of the breathless most-important-speech-of-her-career hype that anticipated Harris’ Thursday night closer. Not because it wasn’t true, but because it was so predictable and trite.

That said, it was a hugely consequential political moment, and Harris delivered flawlessly. I’ve followed her career going back to her days as San Francisco district attorney and never saw her give a better speech.

She was tough. She was authoritative. She was substantive. And, yes, she was joyful.

Your thoughts?

Chabria: There was little to criticize with this speech. To put it simply, she looked presidential — which was the whole point.

Throughout the week, we’ve seen dozens of loud, yelling speeches — the kind that are a staple of rallies and meant to inspire with their energy. But on this arena stage, with its made-for-television sound system, many of those have seemed over-the-top theatrical and just plain loud to at-home viewers.

Harris took a different approach. This was a speech meant to inspire with content as much as delivery. She was confident. She was cool — and most of all, she was in control. This was her moment to sell herself to undecided voters, and she gave a flawless pitch.

Barabak: The Democrats’ indulgent and sloppy scheduling pushed other speakers way past TV’s prime time when, crucially, the most people are watching.

That wasn’t a problem Thursday night.

Harris, a former courtroom prosecutor, knows how to hone an argument. She had much ground to cover — she is that odd combination of famous and largely unknown — and she did so crisply and with forensic precision.

She offered her life story, starting as a little girl, outlined her career as politician and prosecutor — leaning heavily into her role as California attorney general, fighting crime and protecting consumers — and outlined a vision of what a Harris presidency would look like.

Buttressing and broadening the middle class would be, Harris vowed, “the defining goal of my presidency.”

She promised a middle-class tax cut, to fight to restore a nationwide right to abortion, to “end America’s housing shortage” — the presidency comes with no magic wand, so good luck with that one — and to fix the nation’s broken immigration system by signing bipartisan legislation that Donald Trump tanked for political purposes.

Chabria: But she also didn’t shy away from the tough stuff. Gaza and the U.S. response to the Israel-Palestine conflict has been a subtext of this convention. While the huge, disruptive protests that many either feared or expected didn’t materialize, there were protests. And there was a hard but unsuccessful push to include a Palestinian speaker on the agenda.

Harris hit the issue head-on, with clear position statements.

“I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself. Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on Oct. 7,” she said.

Then she turned to Gaza.

“At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating,” Harris said. “President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

This part of the speech garnered some of the loudest and longest applause. One speech doesn’t make this issue go away for her, of course, and it shouldn’t — Biden and Harris both need to deliver on those promises.

But hitting it directly and with clarity shows the kind of accountability we look for in leaders.

She also went directly after Trump. What did you think of that part of her remarks, Mark?

Barabak: She lacerated Trump, citing his role inciting the Jan. 6 riot, his felony conviction for election interference and a jury’s finding he was liable for sexual abuse.

“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” she said, citing the get-out-of-jail-free card handed him by a pliant Supreme Court.

But Harris didn’t leave it to the imagination, outlining a litany of barbarities that await should Trump slink back into the Oval Office: Journalists and his political opponents jailed. Jan. 6 insurrectionists turned loose. The military sicced on the country’s citizens to clamp down on dissent.

Strong stuff.

Chabria: She certainly gave us a sense of what she must have been like in a courtroom. And it drove Trump nuts. He was over on his Truth Social platform posting like a madman. What struck me was how stale Trump’s comebacks were — labeling her a communist, blaming her for the border — compared with what Harris was saying on stage.

For those all-important undecided voters, she really is offering something fresh, something that wasn’t on the ticket with Biden. Undecided voters are always a mystery because you don’t know if they are just not paying attention, have already made up their minds and don’t want to say or are just working off their own idiosyncratic criteria. But if there are voters out there searching for a candidate with a new feel, she’s it.

Beyond Harris, the convention did a good job last night with the speakers who led up to her. Her grand-nieces did a cute bit on how to pronounce her name (which even Bill Clinton flubbed). Comma-la. Not hard.

Four of the Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Five, also gave a powerful speech — reminding us how Trump continues to believe in their guilt decades after DNA and identifying the real rapist cleared them. I was struck by how much of Trump’s language around that case, and those Black teens, now mirrors his language around immigrants.

But the one that got me was sexual abuse survivor and advocate Courtney Baldwin, a Californian who was “bought and sold” via the website Backpage.com while she was a teen, she said.

It was the attorney general’s office under Harris (and Assistant Atty. Gen. Maggy Krell, who is now running for California Assembly) that shut down that site with a novel legal strategy and a lot of relentlessness.

Harris is a champion of sexual abuse victims, and it’s a part of her background that she’s mentioned but is still little understood — for all the trafficking panic on the right, Harris has actually put a lot of pimps behind bars.

“She protected people like me her whole life,” Baldwin said. “I know she will fight for us all as president.”

Was there anything else that stood out to you, Mark?

Barabak: Let’s be real. As a woman, Harris faces doubts about her toughness, especially when it comes to defense and foreign policy. But Trump, with his weird suck-up approach to authoritarianism, made it easy for the vice president to draw a pointed contrast.

She vowed never to be a pushover to flattery, like a certain vain ex-president, and said she would always make sure America has “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Take that, Putin!

One of the most interesting things to watch in recent years has been the political role reversal under Trump’s Russia-loving, isolationist Republican Party. Now it’s Democrats who are the Cold Warriors.

Look at all the American flags filling the convention hall and hear those recurrent chants of “USA!” “USA!” and you’d have thought you were at one of Ronald Reagan’s GOP conventions.

Chabria: Republicans love to demonize women, individually and collectively. Remember how they treated Hillary? They literally accused her of staying artificially young by sacrificing children in a secret lair beneath a pizza parlor.

No doubt, Harris will see the pressure to label her as something beyond just a bad politician — something evil — increase.

But that kind of individual attack can’t be separated from the collective attack anymore. Women in general now feel under assault with the abortion issue, and that makes aggression toward Harris’ gender feel different than with Clinton.

As Harris put it, “One must ask why exactly is it that they don’t trust women. Well, we trust women. We trust women.”

Any final thoughts, Mark?

Barabak: Harris has always prepared herself to within an inch of her life. So her boffo performance — it is, after all, a performance — was not surprising.

The vice president’s forte is the big set piece — a major speech, a congressional hearing — where the climate is controlled.

When she leaves Chicago, it’s back to the messy and unpredictable campaign trail and at least one debate with the feral, unpredictable Trump.

Who knows what crisis may present itself in the next 70–odd days or what gaffes Harris might commit. Can her luck continue?

The path from here to November is unclear. But she’s certainly stepping off from the convention on the right foot.

And in a brief programming note, that’s it from Chicago. Thanks for joining us and we hope you’ll stick around for more to come.